Maxtor exits NAS market, re-focuses on disk

Posted on October 01, 2002

Balancing news of its late-summer exit from the network-attached storage (NAS) market, Maxtor last month announced a trilogy of new disk drives, including an 80GB desktop line, a new ATA family, and a 15,000rpm drive.

The company cited poor revenue and increasing competition with both NAS vendors and its own disk-drive customers as reasons for its exit.

According to company officials, its MaxAttach line accounted for just 1% of company revenue this year.

"It's a struggle when you're competing against large vendors that can offer the same functionality and the same kind of platform as part of a larger brand umbrella," says Jamie Gruener, an analyst with The Yankee Group consulting and research firm.

"We were beginning to supply more and more drives and sub-assemblies, to [other NAS vendors], so the part of the business that was really growing for us was the OEM supply side," says Stephen DiFranco, vice president of corporate marketing for Maxtor.

Maxtor entered the NAS market in 1999 with the purchase of Creative Design Solutions. The company will continue to support MaxAttach users and customers (including Network Appliance) and sell the product line until supplies run out.

Please enable Javascript in your browser, before you post the comment! Now Javascript is disabled.